Savita's mother said that if religion was not about compassion, it was meaningless. Hinduism has done better than Catholicism in many ways.

It would be churlish to allude to customs like Sati that have mostly been abandoned - oops, I have done it now! It looks though as if the menstrual taboo in Hinduism can be even more noxious than in Catholicism although in Buddhism, it has been etiolated away to nothing.

We have just heard in the news of a 15 year old girl in Nepal who was banished to a small windowless hut in cold weather for the offence of menstruating. She lit a fire and subsequently died of smoke inhalation.

This has been known to happen before. In other cases, the unlucky menstruant has died from a snake bite. Sometimes they are banished to a cowshed for the term of their impurity which is not very healthy. There is so much cow dung around.

They are also permitted only a limited range of food, poor in nutrients. They aren't permitted to go to school for the duration either.

This practice of menstrual seclusion is supposed to be banned by law in Nepal. Perhaps it wouldn't happen in Kathmandu.

But of course it is hard to eradicate in the countryside. People really believe that certain gods or goddesses will be angry if it is not complied with.

As late as the 50s in Britain, long after the discovery of the mammalian egg, the folk belief persisted that this mysterious event was caused by 'the Devil getting inside you.'

Part of my mind is shocked that this can happen to a kid born in the twenty first century, a millennium baby. It's upsetting, but realistically, we should be surprised at nothing.

Dafydd and I have been exchanging posts on this thread which express disagreement with oppression based on menstrual taboos. The disapproval was genuine, but our tone was light hearted.

It seemed a bit of a joke. It doesn't sound very funny now.

It's so hard to purge ourselves of these primitive taboos. After all, we've probably all met sane people who believe in demonic possession as the ancients did.

I'll just indulge myself, and stay on this slightly tangential subject of menstrual taboo for one post only. If the taboo can be said to survive in western society today, it does not consist of physical seclusion. It is just considered bad form to mention the subject.

In one way this is understandable. It sounds infantile and annoying when a grown person finds it necessary to make constant references to other bodily functions such as defecation and so on.

We all have to do these things, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. But it is not necessary to talk about it all the time. There's something to be said for distancing ourselves from our animal nature, and discussing more intellectual or abstract subjects.

But the conversational menstrual taboo can be fatal when it is absolute. The Anglican priest Chad Varah was called out to officiate at a burial that would be taking place in unconsecrated ground.

For the dead person had committed suicide, a mortal sin, and was not to be permitted to lie with respectable Christians. It's pretty charmless that the Christian church was still so judgemental about people in extremis in the twentieth century.

Perhaps the Reverend Varah subscribed to the cliche that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life. He was electrified to hear that the person who had committed suicide was a young schoolgirl.

He was wondering aloud why anyone in their 'beautiful decade' as we Cymry call the teenage years, would do such a thing. The pleb assigned to him as an assistant had an idea.

The girl had been in school with his own daughter. The now dead girl had confided to her friend that for the last few days, she had had an unstoppable heamorrhage from her private parts.

She had concluded that she must have a terrible disease. The grave digger's daughter had been quite unable to enlighten her. And she had not felt able to talk to anyone else.

It was this that first inspired Chad Varah to set up the Samaritans. He was determined that in future, nobody need feel that alone.

Another person in holy orders reacted quite differently to the ignorance teenagers sometimes have about their own bodies. A nun from Ireland had enjoyed a reign of terror in a Scottish children's home.

The law caught up with her in the early twenty first century. She was imprisoned for torturing her charges. All counts but one related to physical abuse.

But the court was so impressed by one example of mental torture that they allowed it to go on the indictment. Sex education was never on the curriculum in Catholic homes and schools, unless being sexually exploited by priests can be so described.

A girl in the home had found blood seeping between her thighs. She plucked up the courage to ask the nun for guidance about why this was happening.

The nun told her that she'd been cursed for her sins, and she would die by midnight. I don't suppose I shall ever recover from my maniacal hatred of nuns while these stories keep appearing in the news.

Judaism may have a strong menstrual taboo, but perhaps the taboo doesn't extend to talking about the subject in graphic detail. Della, a Red Sea pedestrian, was a great one for discussing her symptoms in front of male people she had just met, oblivious of their reaction.

She was assuring us enthusiastically in Wetherspoons in Abergavenny that 'it's like a butcher's slab down there!' A rather squeamish type looked down at the burger he had just covered in ketchup, shuddered, and pushed it to one side.

He told me later how much he didn't appreciate this sort of talk. But perhaps it is his problem.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with talking like this. It could be a cultural difference that Goyim are unprepared for. Della told me that her mother had been slapped hard across the face by her own mother to mark her entry into womanhood as the onset of menstruation was perceived.

Della was thankful that her mother, who in other ways, was far from enlightened, had omitted this puberty rite in her own case. She had not appreciated it herself, and was not convinced of its necessity.

I understand that the more enlightened forms of Judaism do now have events to mark menarche, but they are not painful. They try to see it in a positive light.

There is even a book called 'Kosher Sex' which aims to show menstrual apartness in a good light. Because married couples are forbidden to bonk literally half the time, they apparently don't go stale.

They don't take sex for granted. They're always gagging for it.

That may be so. But it is an accidental by -product of what was originally a negative and primitive superstition.

Not all people with primitive technology have menstrual taboos. Among the !Kung Bushwomen of the Kalahari desert, everyone could see it was happening as they did not traditionally wear clothes.

It was just ignored. It was considered very rude to comment on it.

The Indian government has declared a three mile exclusion zone around Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal. It is because the Sentinelese islanders have been isolated from other humans for about 40, 000 years.

Like Native Americans in Columbus' time, they have no resistance to modern diseases. There is a danger they would go extinct if they were exposed to contact with the outside world.

Other Andaman islanders are on the very brink of extinction. Although resident in Asia since ancient times, they outwardly resemble African Pygmies. Like Bushwomen, the females have steatopygia, large accumulations of fat in the derriere.

An anthropologist in the early twentieth century described the elaborate ritual to mark first menstruation observed by the Andamanese islanders. The girl would inform her parents who wept over her.

She would then be divested of any jewellery and covered in leaves instead. Her parents and their friends would construct a leafy temporary hut. She would have to stay in this for three days and nights with her legs doubled up under her and with folded arms.

To alleviate cramp, she could stretch one arm or leg at a time, but never both at once. She would not be allowed to sleep for three days and nights. Her parents and neighbours would stay with her to prevent this happening.

They would also provide her with food. She could release one hand to skewer the food with make shift cutlery. But she would not be allowed to touch the food with her hands.

Each morning at dawn she would leave the hut to swim in the sea, but she then had to return. I don't think she was allowed to speak for all this time either.

I can't work out if this is a coming of age celebration or an ingenious punishment for being a woman. Is there anything to be said for these initiation rituals?

I have some doubts. For male Aborigines, they can involve circumcision or subincision which must be intensely painful.

We had an acquaintance of Austrian and Mozambican parentage who was keen on 'Noble Savage' ideas. If I remember rightly, he once expressed enthusiasm for a puberty rite that would involve a mandatory public bonk.

I don't know about that. Someone will remind me of where it was that adolescent boys had to go through a puberty ritual which involved stimulating the genitals of older men with their mouths. Has it ever occurred to anyone that this is a bit exploitative?

Perhaps Dafydd knows if the Pitcairn islands were ever inhabited before the mutineers from the Bounty landed there. My understanding is that they and the Polynesian women they brought as concubines, were the first humans ever to set foot in the place.

Their entirely new society evolved its own traditions. Not long ago, the majority of adult male Pitcairn islanders were in prison for child abuse.

But that's not how they saw it. A little girl shudderingly remembered that an older man forced himself on her. 'He said he was initiating me.'

In the UK, the Times agreed with him. It was not for imperialist busy bodies to interfere in other people's quaint customs.

I hesitate to contradict the Thunderer, but here's an illustration from real life of how seriously we should take this argument. In the early nineteenth century, a high caste Hindu was looking forward to pumping a recent widow full of drugs, tying her down to some faggots on her husband's funeral pyre, and inviting loads of guests to watch the fun as she was set on fire.

His interlocutor, an employee of 'John Company', the British East India Company, expressed some distaste. The Hindu tried to set his mind at rest about the propriety of the festival.

He said, ''It is our custom to burn widows.'' The Briton said, ''In my country, we too have a custom. It is that when a man murders a woman, he is hanged.

''You light your pyre and observe your custom. And all the while, we will be constructing a gallows nearby. And after you have observed your custom, we will observe ours.''

This shows the utter bankruptcy of moral relativism. It doesn't even make sense on its own terms.

But didn't I vow not to mention Sati as it is rude to remind Hindus of their former bad behaviour, now that they have abandoned it and are currently much better than Catholics? It might be a bit tactless, but this story illustrates the point so well. I'll let it stand.

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Francis Becket said what an unpleasant charmless woman with a permanent scowl was an anti-sex education campaigner he sat next to on a Sunday morning TV show. Lynette Burrows is a sister of Victoria Gillick. She has six children while her sister has ten.

Mrs Burrows condemns sex education. She says it means showing dirty pictures to children, and it 'destroys childhood innocence in a way reminiscent of paedophilia.'

She is also a committed Roman Catholic. Francis Becket didn't think the Catholic Church had much to shout about on the subject of paedophilia.

Victoria Gillick was also an opponent of sex education back in the day, partly because the text books her children brought home described what she called 'self abuse.' She was so disgusted by some steamy passages that she read the worst parts over the phone to the other parents of kids at her children's school.

It can be hard to tell where prudish disapproval ends and prurient gloating begins. She was lucky not to be arrested as a phone pest.

Her sister Lynette has a thing about 'children's rights' which she emphatically does not support. When her neighbour's small son was a bit impertinent to her, she threatened to beat him black and blue. I've seen an internet video where she is delivering an anti-gay lecture.

I mentioned on another post that a female teacher caused a scandal by demonstrating masturbation on a sex education video in 1971. It was so explicit that it has only recently been reshown uncut.

The teacher may have lost her job. Nothing worse happened to her.

After a little girl was killed by a paedophile in 2000, the country was swept by a wave of hysteria. This was partly the fault of the News of the World.

Each week it published a rogues' gallery of pictures of adults with child sex convictions, all of whom were at large in the community. They were quite grainy indistinct images.

Lynch mobs rampaged looking for them. They attacked all sorts of innocent people. Not once was any of these victims of mob violence a convicted paedophile.

They couldn't find one even by accident. A female paediatrician in Newport was hounded from her surgery. After all, she admitted it herself. Even the brass plate outside the surgery described her as a paediatrician!

I was surprised to see that one of the faces in the photo gallery in the paper was of a woman who had had intercourse with a 14 year old boy. When we were growing up, we thought the age of consent was 16.

That was not quite right. When I later did a law course, I found out it only applied to girls, and only then in a heterosexual context.

There was no heterosexual age of consent for a boy except in Scotland where it was 14. My understanding was that if a woman lay there like a corpse and let a young boy get on with it, no crime would be committed. It might be indecent assault if she actively participated.

My information was out of date. About the turn of the millennium, lawyers began applying equalisation. They would assume that a law that applied to one sex also applied to the other.

I said to male friends, ''Do you think a woman who has it off with a fourteen year old boy should be described as a paedophile - I mean in a photo gallery in the News of the World?''

I argued that a boy couldn't perform unless he felt like it. He was in no danger of getting pregnant. Was it that he would be harmed psychologically?

A transvestite artist assured me that a boy of 14 was much more innocent than a girl of the same age. He needed protection.

I bowed to his knowledge. After all, I'd never been a boy. What did I know?

But my husband disagreed. He said, ''When I was 14, I'd have been grateful.''

Dafydd agreed with this. He said, ''Every 14 year old boy wants a shag.''

But the law does not agree. Since 2001 the age of consent for gay men is 16, down from 18. For a long time after 1967 it had been 21.

In 2001 also, the age of consent was set at 16 for lesbians, acknowledging the existence of lesbianism for the first time. It really is true that it had escaped being criminalised in 1885 because Queen Victoria refused to believe that it existed.

A bill to outlaw lesbianism passed the House of the Commons in the 20s. But the House of Lords threw it out. They argued that few people had heard of lesbianism, but if there was a law against it, they would get to hear about it, and might be tempted to try it!

These things are all about physical acts not images. So imagine my surprise when a Caerphilly woman was jailed for twelve months recently for sending nude images of herself doing sex things to a paedophile whom she wrongly believed to be a 14 year old boy!

She was imprisoned because if the recipient had been a 14 year old boy, he would have been 'corrupted.' This is not what happened to the female teacher in 1971. Her video was even thought to be educational!

Where was the actus reus, the guilty act? There was no 14 year old boy. A crime used to consist of a guilty mind and a guilty act except for a very few strict liability offences.

In the 70s, parents were encouraged to walk around naked in front of their small children. It was thought to be 'natural'.

I was working as a life model for artists in the back room of a pub in 2011. Two young barmaids and a barman of about 16 walked through to a connecting room.

The girls were giggling. It was like an explosion in a giggle factory.

Shortly after this, the fire alarm sounded. Two firemen burst in, saw me lying there and became very interested in looking at the ceiling. This was probably the bar staff's idea of a joke.

An artist told me later that I need not worry about the 16 year old boy. He had been shocked by my nudity but not unpleasantly. She said, ''You made his day.''

It's a big mistake to confuse nudity with obscenity. It is true that the Caerphilly woman was doing something that could be dangerous- apparently.

I well remember reading when I was 19 a book by an Israeli sexologist, aptly called Avadah Offit. She said that oral sex can kill. It can cause an air embolism.

I was very grateful to the other undergraduate who lent me the book. It's definitely something that judges have considered perilous since the time of the Fatty Arbuckle murder case.

It probably influenced the summing up of the judge in the Rupert Bear obscenity trial in 1971. He sounded a bit confused, remarking, ''Not having had a classical education, I am not familiar with this term cunnilingus.''

As he misdirected the jury on the meaning of obscenity, the convictions were overturned on appeal. But that's not going to happen in the more recent case.

Even I feel no real sympathy with the defendant. When we catch up with the mores of the present day world, we will all understand why it is important not to corrupt imaginary 14 year old boys.

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Sam Harris said that we're still fighting for women's right to birth control, never mind abortion. He said the Catholic Church would oppose contraception with its last breath, believing it is exercising the most finely calibrated morality the world has ever known.

All the while it is shielding an army of child rapists, threatening the victims with endless litigation in this world and endless torment in Hell in the next. He said the needless human suffering and the misuse of human energy boggle the mind.

He was right of course, but we have hopes that Pope Francis will back down on contraception, so the Church will not be opposing contraception literally with its last breath after all. Although Sam Harris is not entirely happy about abortion, he believes he has a knock down argument to one objection to it.

If you catch an unplanned pregnancy in time and terminate it, you might think this thing was so unformed that it could not be described as a person by any stretch of the imagination. But this leads to further reflection.

It was not a person at the time but it was a potential person. You may even have the misfortune to be haunted later by wondering what the person would have been like.

Sam Harris thinks this kind of talk is pointless. He says that with present day technology it would be possible to take a cell from any part of the human body and, given the right treatment, it has the potential to develop into a person.

He aroused laughter by saying that when the president scratches his nose, he is engaged in a holocaust of potential persons. Although he is technically right, and it is an ingenious argument, it doesn't sound totally convincing intuitively.

I think this is because - if it is viable at all - an embryonic cell will develop into a person automatically if left to its own devices. It would take some quite complicated technology to permit any random human cell to do that.

To say that it doesn't sound especially convincing on an intuitive level, is not the same thing as saying that Sam Harris is wrong. Maybe there's something wrong with my intuition.

He has some other things to say about the Catholic Church which are really compelling. His incisive style can help to clarify your thoughts on the subject.

I can't give a link to Sam Harris' mesmerising video on the Vatican. It appears not to be available on the net any longer.

So I'll share the highlights. The Catholic Church has spent two millennia 'demonising human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution', and still opposes contraception, preferring the poor of the earth to be blessed with the most offspring 'and the shortest lives.'

Add to the mix 'the artifice of cloistered celibacy', and the world's wealthiest institution 'preferentially attracts' paedophiles and sexual sadists into its ranks', giving them unlimited access to children.

Then let it 'vilify' unmarried mothers so that hordes of illegitimate children will be abandoned to its orphanages to be 'raped and terrorised by the clergy.'

Harris remarks on 'how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord.' He adds that we need not speak of the scandal in the Catholic Church. Better say the scandal that is the Catholic Church.

The 'evidence is' that the 'misery' of these children was organised and covered up by the Church hierarchy 'at every level up to and including the pre-frontal cortex of' Pope Benedict xvi.

Harris concluded:

'It is no exaggeration to say that for decades (if not centuries) the Vatican has met the formal definition of a criminal organisation, devoted not to gambling, prostitution, drugs or any other venial sin, but to the sexual enslavement of children.'

One reason I had hoped to find a link to the video was that I would prefer Sam Harris to quote from the CICA report than have to select parts of it myself. Just thinking about it makes me grind my teeth.

In one school four boys testified independently to being gang raped by four Christian Brothers, and left bleeding. One of the witnesses said, ''They were animals.''

Each episode of penetration was followed by 'a severe beating.' This would get the Brothers sufficiently excited to perform again.

One boy said that when he refused to masturbate a Christian Brother, he hit him with a hurley and 'burst my fingers.' He displayed the scar.

At night, residents were petrified, hearing the screams from the toilets, cloak rooms and dormitories. Brother X would say, ''If you don't mind your own business, you'll get the same.''

Sam Harris thought we had to dismiss any ideas about the 'shades of ancient Athens' or 'the love that dare not speak its name.' It was not that a priest was poetically in love with a youth, and foolishly gave in to mutual desire the night before the young man's 18th birthday.

Instead we have the grubby scenario of 'the systematic rape and torture of orphaned and disabled children.' Here is my sanitised paraphrase of Sam Harris' precis of an 'oppressive fraction' of the report which was all he could bring himself to scan.

The monks set upon the boys and beat them up, not with their fists but in a ritualised SM way with specially sharpened leathers. They then sodomised them till bloody.

Stage three was another session with the leathers, followed by more anal rape, generally by multiple assailants. Finally, the victim was threatened with death and hell if he told anyone about it.

Harris commented, 'Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence with threats of hell. And then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time - and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years.'

Which latter comments bring to mind the principle behind Democracy which is actually derived from the corrupt religious idea " Vox Populi Vox Dei " - in other words that political decisions belong to the those who can exercise power over others : I would question whether the child abuse that you describe is really about sexuality although it is being expressed through sexual acts ... Surely buggering and then beating small boys is about the relatively powerless within an organisation built upon absolute power finding some power for themselves over those even more powerless ? ... It would then be explained away as " discipline " and maintaining " authority " and seem as entirely reasonable as burning people at the stake for not eating fish on Fridays because this is construed as criticism of The Pope who publicly always eats fish-finger sandwiches on Fridays albeit privately he sticks two fingers down his throat afterwards ... A Papal Bully-me-yeah ?

It was Oscar Wilde who said that everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.

Josef Fritzl was known to his compatriots as 'Das Inzeztmonster' shortly after his apprehension. They had missed the point.

This is he who kept his daughter imprisoned in a cellar for decades, and had six or seven children by her. The sex was secondary; the incest was incidental.

He was a regular customer at brothels which are legal in Austria. He had all the sex on tap and any variants of it that he could want, without keeping his daughter as a sex slave. What he was interested in was power - power and domination.

Maybe you are right about the Christian Brothers. They had to take vows of obedience, poverty - and they weren't bothered about the third one. That's not a natural life for an adult.

The Pope may not be the last absolute monarch in the world - what about the kings of Saudi Arabia and Lesotho? - but he is the last one in Europe.

So yes, monks and also nuns are frustrated by their lack of power in most areas of their lives. But let's not waste any sympathy on them. They can leave the monastery whenever they like.

Of course it's easy to dress abuse up as punishment in our society. The recently deceased rabbi Lionel Blue said that Christianity suffered from the neurosis of sado-masochism.

We are inured to the crucifixes all over the place. We're so used to them that we don't think they look disturbing.

But if you look at graphic images of imaginary saints and martyrs such as St Laurence on the gridiron in Catholic art, it is disturbing. These pictures are not for the squeamish.

What is especially disturbing is that these saints never existed. What is being depicted is the suffering that the Church inflicted on its pagan and heretic victims. St Catherine on her wheel represents the philosopher Hypatia, lynched by a Christian mob.

Lionel may have forgotten that Shia Islam is much the same. You can see screaming processions of Shiites hitting themselves around the head until the blood runs on the anniversary of Ali's martyrdom - and much worse things than that.

But masochism is a misnomer in the case of these unfortunate boys. There is no reason to think that they had any pleasure out of the monks' attentions, far from it.

Of course the kids would have been too frightened to point out to the monks where their behaviour differed from their professed values. I had an acquaintance who could be described as amoral. He had no problem with robbing banks or homicide although he'd never actually done these things.

He had been to a Catholic school. He reminisced about a priest having a hissy fit, because the congregation hadn't put higher denomination notes in the collection plate.

I was surprised to hear that the priest gave the kids lectures denouncing masturbation. In my school, it would have been a serious gaffe to have mentioned such a word. It would have been like uttering a swear word from the platform.

These lectures had a deep effect on him. He said this was something he could not do. It would be pathetic, like drinking a cup of tepid tea, and imagining that it was champagne.

I said, ''You've got it all wrong! This is something that almost all men and the majority of women do. It's inevitable that you're going to imagine that you're doing something more exciting.

''It's more a physiological than a psychological thing. It doesn't mean you're a pathetic Walter Mitty character!''

This conversation must have happened before the scandal exploded. It didn't occur to him that this was a rather strange thing for a priest to worry about. Apart from the triviality of it, why would they even think about it?

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His interlocutor, an employee of 'John Company', the British East India Company, expressed some distaste. The Hindu tried to set his mind at rest about the propriety of the festival.

He said, ''It is our custom to burn widows.'' The Briton said, ''In my country, we too have a custom. It is that when a man murders a woman, he is hanged.

''You light your pyre and observe your custom. And all the while, we will be constructing a gallows nearby. And after you have observed your custom, we will observe ours.''

Xeno of Ibid believed Predestination
One of his slaves was caught stealing beer and said
"Masser, I was predestined to steal."
Xeno said "Your destiny is to be whipped."

Savages locked the monstrous woman in the lowly cattle shed with the lowly cattle shit. That means the shit will be unclean. When they put the shit on the field and grow wheat, the bread will be unclean. When they sing Mass, the Flesh of Mohamed will be unclean.

Will the Flesh of Mohamed be more defiled from the monstrous woman in the lowly cattle shed or from the Priest who spoke to the monstrous woman???_________________Liberty - Equality - Fraternity : Aux armes, Citoyens !

War is Politics by other Methods - General von Clausewitz
Politics is War by other Methods - Some guy on the Internet

I suppose the cow shed scenario is more unclean than talking to the priest because the communion wafer is unclean from the start. I will soon get over the story about the 15 year old girl who died of smoke inhalation in a menstrual hut, as I did not know her personally.

But at the moment I feel angry, and hope her parents are ashamed of themselves. It's really bad to be chucked out of the house at the very time you feel achy and delicate and as if you would like to curl up like a cat by the fire.

Health columns in magazines will say you shouldn't cosset yourself at this time. You should go out on a cross country run. What you need is exercise.

That may be so if you are suffering from nothing worse than cramps. But what if you're severely depleted of blood as you would be after a car crash? You don't need to go on a five mile hike then.

I fell to the floor unconscious while standing at the bar in Wetherspoons on one of these occasions. Apparently, it was quite dramatic and caused a bit of a stir.

One of our old Pagan associates was quite inarticulate. He wanted us to go to a Hindu temple.

Karin objected. She said there was a notice outside requesting menstruating women not to enter.

He replied, ''Oh, we'll arrange to go when no one's doing it.'' ''That's not the point'', said Karin.

She had an ideological objection to this offensive taboo. We even heard that the place kept blood hounds to prevent menstruants getting in, but that may be a myth.

The poor guy became so confused in his own argument that he ended by demanding, ''Why are you being so sexist towards the Hindu temple?''

Liz was thoroughly exasperated. Perhaps Sam Harris is right about what you see is what you get. If somebody is outwardly inarticulate, it's not likely that they're a lucid philosopher on the inside.

After making allowances for shyness or physical incapacity, if those are not present, maybe this is a person who couldn't carry a logical argument in a bag.

I don't think Xeno was such a great wit. Few philosophers can live by their philosophy, and he was no better than the rest. Wasn't he the one who thought God was spherical?

As Dafydd took an interest, I've done some more research on quaint and delightful customs in Nepal.

Nepalese schoolgirls, anxious to draw our attention to their plight, have taken pictures of the things they can't touch while menstruating. These include combs, hairbrushes and mirrors. They are also forbidden to look at themselves in mirrors or to read schoolbooks or any other books.

Some of them have to leave school altogether. They are not permitted to look at the sun - not a very sensible thing to do anyway, unless it is low in the sky. They are forbidden to eat or touch meat, fruit, vegetables or dairy products.

Sofalta Rokaya aged 16 sleeps in a dark filthy cowshed when she is 'impure.' It is sweltering in summer, freezing in winter.

She was 'terrified' to tell her parents when she first became ritually unclean. ''[It] would mean staying in the cowshed, and I didn't know if I could do it.I feel horrible here. - the cow dung smells and the animals step on us. The dirt and hay get stuck all over my body.''

Gita Rokaya - her mother? - said, ''We don't want to live like this but our gods won't tolerate it any other way.''

Kamala, 14, was afraid to go near anyone's house or verandah while 'unclean' in case they hit her. She believed that she would call down a curse on her parents' house if she entered it at this time, and that her hands would shrivel up and become deformed.

She had to sleep outside in the 'red hut' which was in effect a 'shocking' bamboo cage on a raised platform. There was just about room for one person to lie flat.

But she was not able to do this on the nights her female cousins were also emitting. They would have to perch like battery hens.

They were afraid of being attacked by drunken men or opportunistic sexual predators during the night, something that often happens.

Of course they are not allowed access to toilets, running water, tampons or anything useful like that, and are in danger of getting infections.

Prakriti Kandel is a city girl from a middle class family. Her parents are proud of her academic record and hope she will later study abroad. They are touchy feely, always showing their affection physically.

But even she is not allowed the remotest physical contact with her parents or grandmother while menstruating. She is not allowed in the kitchen or to touch her parents' food.

Sometimes she breaks the rules through forgetfulness or deliberate defiance. This leads to an argument, and she storms off to her room in angry tears.

Her father was once admitted to hospital with a mystery complaint. The priest accused her of 'infuriating the gods' by touching him while unclean.

Older women are banished to cowsheds for ten days when they are about to give birth.Laxmi Raut gave birth to a baby in a filthy and freezing shed. The baby lived for 18 days, and then died of flu.

Laxmi has now changed her mind. She thinks that women who are doing mysterious things with their wombs should be allowed to stay in their own homes instead of being ostracised.

I hope this post really will be the last one about menstrual taboo as this is a bit of a distraction from the RC Church. Chaupadi - the practice of regular exile to a shed based on this primitive nonsense - has been illegal in Nepal since 2005.

But in the west of the country, the folk are incorrigible. I've seen a picture of a quite handsome Nepalese woman in national dress crawling out of a nasty stone hut on her hands and knees.

A girl showed us her baby in a film on the subject. The reason she had had him at a tender age was that a neighbour spied on her when she was in the red hut, and finally cornered her there and forced his attentions on her.

And she still sleeps in the menstrual hut which has such awful associations for her, at the requisite time!

A village elder and traditional healer gave a learned lecture on how if women were allowed to live in their own homes during menstruation, tigers would come into the houses and eat everyone. He appeared totally confident and authoritative as he made this ridiculous statement.

Not surprisingly, women who have to live like this often suffer from physical and mental illnesses. Since the body of 15 year old Roshani Tiraua was found dead in a menstrual hut, the police have been on the case. I hope they make an example of the idiots responsible.

But am I not also guilty of a lesser form of chaupadi? Asked to be the nude model at an art class on a specific day, I said I hoped I could manage it, but with many apologies and some euphemistic phrases, explained that I might be in no fit state.

I think I had a rational point in this case. The tutor was usually reasonable enough, but was not very happy in this case.

He demanded sternly, 'Well, Marianne, if this is not a personal question, is this going to happen every month?'' I thought it was like asking if the sun was going to rise every morning.

Of course, the contraceptive pill can be used to regulate these things, but not reliably in my experience. The tutor really appeared to think this was something I had arranged for my own amusement.

Some ludicrous blogger in his teens opposed removing VAT from tampons on the grounds that if women weren't so lazy and filthy, they would learn to exercise better control of their bladders!

Do most young men think that this stuff comes out of the bladder? Do they think it can be controlled as you can control a stream of urine?

For the information of millennials who are lucky enough not to know this from experience, it emerges from the womb. Pedants would say it ultimately really is controlled by the brain and so is lactation. So I will just say it cannot be controlled by a conscious effort of will.

Dafydd and I both have a love hate relationship with religion. It's mostly hate. If it was possible for human beings to be entirely sensible, it would be just hate.

I think Dai has an even stronger emotional attachment, to religion, but is intellectually aware of its dark side. Christopher Hitchens quoted Mark Twain on the writings of Mary Baker Eddy: ' chloroform in print.' But people want to read this stuff.

Christian Scientists tell you that sickness is an illusion. They encourage you to pray instead of looking for a natural cause for your suffering.

They may not mean any harm. They may have your interests at heart. But it doesn't mean their influence is not potentially lethal.

All human beings are ill served by religion when it trespasses on areas in which medicine and technology should be supreme. This is notoriously the case when priests say AIDS is bad, very bad, but it is not bad in the way that condoms are bad.

Women are especially vulnerable here as their innards are slightly more complicated than those of their brothers,so as to accommodate the dull details of reproduction. I've seen news on the computer side bar recently about a couple who had triplets, possibly as the result of fertility treatment. It's more successful that you want it to be sometimes.

Sadly, the news was about tributes to the triplets' mother who is now dead. I didn't feel like reading the details but it may be that each child had a separate placenta, a separate site for post natal bleeding.

It's unusual to die of the after effects of childbirth these days in the west. It could happen for a number of reasons.

A friend told me she usually said her mother died in childbirth. But the details were that she was forced to lie down when she wanted to sit up to emit post birth vomit.

That must be unusual. Multiple births do pose a bit of a risk, but blood transfusions are a great thing.

We read in the paper of a 22 year old Jehovah's Witness who presented the maternity unit with a statement that in no circumstances would she accept a blood transfusion. She preferred to obey the strictures of Jehovah about 'whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.'

She had twins, probably well aware of how this put her at extra risk for debilitating blood loss, and did die from post natal bleeding shortly afterwards.

When I discussed this with my partner, he said she should have been sectioned in an emergency application and then given a mandatory blood transfusion. He didn't think hospitals had any right to humour irrationality.

After all,a Jehovah's Witness under 18 would be made a ward of court instantaneously in a case like this. British hospitals have a special arrangement with the high court.

I agree of course, but it is daunting for Jehovah's Witnesses. Their families and the entire sect will ostracise them if they accept a blood donation.

As all the power in the RC Church outside convents in held by men, it is no wonder that the organisation has an insouciant and even denialist attitude to the danger and inconvenience of Stone Age fertility.

It is quite understandable that men rarely if ever think what a drag and what a pain parturition was, in the days before anaesthetics and modern medicine. It 's not something they will ever have to experience so why should they ever think about it? Not thinking about it is not the same as being a sadist.

There is no longer a movement in the Anglican Church which actively opposes anaesthetics in this case only, on the grounds that God stated in Genesis that women should give birth in agony; it was the curse of Eve and well deserved.

I have just met one male person who seriously holds this belief. He is a bit of a nutter.

But sadly there are women who think they should give birth without having so much as an aspirin. This is not for religious reasons.

They have fallen for the fad of 'natural childbirth.' They think the adjective 'natural' has some mystic significance just as 'essential' does in essential oils.

They think that if they can't give birth like cavewomen they have failed somehow. They would be truly devastated if they couldn't manage a vaginal delivery at all, and had to be put in for an emergency caesarean.

This is the female equivalent of macho. You might just as well say, ''No, I'm not going to the dentist. I'm going to tie one end of a piece of string around a door handle and the other round my tooth, and then I'll slam the door.

''It's much more natural. It was good enough for my great great grandfather, and it's good enough for me.''

We've been rightly critical of purification ceremonies, mikvehs and the rest of it. But in the Christian Church, the ritual of purification after childbirth did begin to evolve into a ceremony of thanks that it was over with no permanent damage done.

In acknowledgement that childbirth was just about the worst pain a woman could experience in life, much worse than leg or eyebrow waxing, it was appropriate for the post parturient woman to quote the psalm: 'The fear of death compassed me round and the pain of hell gat hold on me.'

I once appeared at a maternity department five weeks before the expected time moaning softly, and saying I had no doubt the baby was coming now. I had been afraid I was going to give birth in the taxi.

The moaning became less soft when they refused to give me an epidural. They said there was no point. By the time it took effect, the baby would be out.

The staff ordered me to stop screaming. They said it was a waste of energy.

I was not in a position to think of a sarcastic retort. Later staircase wit suggested, ''What do you think I should be doing with this energy instead? Running round on the treadmill that keeps the hospital lights going?''

I just tried to scratch and kick the midwives as I didn't want to suffer alone. Rather than go through that again, I'd face a firing squad. It would be quicker and cleaner.

A friend's mother tried to throw herself out of an upper storey window in similar straits in a Pakistani hospital where there were no pain killers. I'm not surprised.

Even quite well adjusted people might feel an unaccountable urge to scrape their nails down the back of their loved one in a moment of passion. You don't have to be as perverted as a Catholic priest to enjoy a bit of 'slap and tickle.'

Love bites are normal. Everyone is somewhere on the spectrum.

But if you're enough of a masochist to volunteer for natural childbirth, you've either no idea what it involves or you need your head read. Don't even consider it. Be kind to yourself.

Just because something is natural, doesn't mean it's good. Sam Harris would say it is the most natural thing in the world to be mauled to death by a bear.

Thought provoking ... " I think Dai has an even stronger emotional attachment, to religion, but is intellectually aware of its dark side. " ... The fact is that I thought that I was through with religion - or rather " organised religion " - aged sixteen excepting that I then went on to read an amount of anthropology when studying primitive artifacts for my Art & Design "A" level and in learning about Shamanism I decided that " Spirituality " is a universal human experience ... I then experienced a bit of it for myself and decided that I needed some advice upon the matter, a religious community in which there was a healthy questioning attitude ... an experimental scientific attitude : I designed such a community ... I considered how to found a healthy religion which was not given up to superstition nor trapped in intellectual orthodoxies nor predated by priests etc but ... then I encountered Quakerism and thought that it was more or less what I advocated ... until recently : now I think that the orthopraxy which theoretically enables Quakerism to work is not being cared for - and it has in so many cases declined into a middle-class coffee morning centred around a period of paranoid silence ... There is no exchange of ideas and nor comparison of experiences going on : this not the praxis ... the silence has become an excuse to avoid being asked for a contribution - apparently because people are not able to because they are not studying and developing their understanding : asking for a contribution leads to responses that verge upon the paranoid ... and that is how I came to turn towards Judaism's texts - because the silence was dead and so I began reading a lot : Quakerism is based upon worshiping in a silence not a vacuum - to practice Quakerism you need to draw upon spiritual literature, but it can be any suitable one e.g. in the past I have drawn upon Taoism, Buddhism etc. ... I think that the best attitude to take is that religion is the human activity of our collectively making sense of the world and basically consists of labeling some things as being desirable and other things as being undesirable ... i.e. " Religion is The Public Discourse about Morality."

HENCE THIS IS RELIGION - " Christopher Hitchens quoted Mark Twain on the writings of Mary Baker Eddy: ' chloroform in print.' But people want to read this stuff."

What stuff do they read ? ... Well what they like : that is the problem - The People in THOSE Religions are mostly not interested in what The People in THESE Religions are interested in : religious activities are about propagating ideologies - " PERIOD ! " ... Religions in general are not about great philosophy but about enough philosophy - like football clubs are not about great sportmanship but about enough sportsmanship : who cares if their football club does not have the greatest team - it is their football club and their team ... and in a sense " Islamic Jihadis " are a sort of religious equivalent of football hooligans : the term is an oxymoron just as is " Jewish Zionists " ... perhaps " Millwall FC " is the sporting equivalent of " Isalamic State " - ? ... Aesthetically I wanted a religion reconciled to or at least paying lip service to science and since the latter is pointed towards investigating The Law(s) of Nature that in turn led me towards Hylozoism as the experimental basis to investigate those laws which in turn led me to Nomosticism etc which basically is what underpins the whole enterprise of most religions - especially perhaps those of Monotheism - which imagine that the obvious orderliness of the cosmos is the work of a law-giving creator ... but I do not see any need for an actual god - but I do see that many others need to imagine such gods ... and usually make them in their own image - which is where the trouble with " Sovereignty " starts - " God and I are above The Rule of Law."

I subscribe to " Non-Theism " and therefore I have no problem with others devising mytho-poetic gods for the purposes of regulating their ideologies which they are transmitting to others through the human activities used in religion - unless they abuse religion by turning it into a means to obtain power over others by declaring that certain persons have " divine rights " i.e. have converted religion into " Hierocracy." This of course is why Wales was subjected to The Annexation - it was a Catholic country when Henry VIII declared himself both Protestant and Supreme Head of The Church in England by invoking The Divine Right of Kings ... but he was not The King in Wales where The ( Catholic ) Church in Wales and the Aristocracy which supported it were trying to make theirs into a common cause with France or Spain ... the trouble caused by these assertions of Hierocracy persisted into the 17c and were prominent aspects of The Wars of The Three Kingdoms.

People often say they don't want or need religion or a god themselves but that other people appear to need faith. Freke and Gandy comment that you can tell what individual Christians are like from their convictions about what Jesus was like.

Hippies have hippy Jesuses. Would -be revolutionaries have Che Guevara Jesuses. Intolerant fundamentalists have intolerant fundamentalist Jesuses. They are looking down a deep well and seeing their own reflections.

The fact is that Catholics and Christian Scientists deny science. Yes, Pope Benedict XVi has declared that Galileo was in the wrong after all! We don't even want to think about Giordano Bruno who speculated that other worlds might be inhabited, and came to a sticky end or rather an extremely hot one.

Jehovah's Witnesses do deny science, and also refuse the benefits of medical science even when they don't deny its usefulness. Somewhere in the Bible Belt, are a Christian sect who bring in boxes of great puff adders and other venomous snakes at the end of each church service.

The faithful pick the snakes up and wave them around their heads. As you would imagine, fatal snakebites are a common side effect. If you're lucky, an emergency amputation will save your life.

Why do they do it? At the end of one of the Gospels - I think it is Luke - comes a short list of signs by which you can tell the true Christian. One is that 'they shall take up serpents.'

Outsiders have tried to talk sense into these morons. They have pointed out that the prophecy has been invalidated time and again. They are not granted divine protection when they swing snakes around.

Their response is logical as far as it goes. Luke said only that true Christians would take up serpents. Nowhere in the text does it say that they shall do so without coming to any harm.

I've felt I should give some slack to eastern religions. After all, they do have some useful meditation techniques.

But it is essential to take what is good, and reject firmly everything about caste and karma. When it was suggested that the Khmer Rouge be brought to justice, a lot of lazy Buddhists started whining and yawning.

Why would that be necessary? After all, every one of Pol Pot's victims must have been paying for their sins in a previous life. It was nothing but the working out of their own karma.

Before he went completely crazy, a white Buddhist of our acquaintance always managed to put himself into a situation where other people's karma required that he break their bones. And he was so pleased with himself about it!

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Pope Pius ix, known to his compatriots, as Pio Nono, was a narcissistic drama king who called himself 'the prisoner of the Vatican' after things didn't go entirely his way after the unification of Italy. I think it may be right that he resumed beheading people in public squares too, a custom that had fallen into disuse.

On the balance of probabilities, it looks as if he was a practising paedophile who enjoyed hiding his 'adopted son' under his hassock or was it a cassock? One is a priest's frock. The other is a cushion that the faithful can kneel on during the liturgy.

This is what he did in public. God alone knows what happened in private - but we can make an educated guess. How on earth did this supposedly celibate hysteric get hold of a boy of his very own to play with all the time?

Richard Dawkins provides the answer in 'The God Delusion.' Edgardo Mortara was a six year old boy who had the misfortune to be living in Bologna which was then in the Papal States.

In 1858 he was legally kidnapped by the Papal police. He was firstly deposited in 'the House of Catechumens', a bleak residential place for those about to be prepared for confirmation.

What was the legal basis for his seizure? He was the child of Jewish parents who had employed a teenage maid or baby sitter of Catholic parentage.

When Edgardo was a very small boy, he had been taken ill, and the girl was consumed by fear that he would die. Her main fear was for his soul. So, without consulting anyone, she had baptised him as a Catholic.

The Catholic Church prohibited women from taking an active part in church life in almost every respect. Yet it had never debarred them from conducting valid baptisms. It is easy to see why young servants were encouraged to baptise their playmates and charges who were lucky enough not to be born to Catholic parents.

Of course, there was a tremendous scandal. Several influential people became involved, including the Rothschilds. Rather surprisingly, there were a good number of people on the other side too.

Somebody even accused those who objected to the kidnapping of bigotry. As Dawkins says, it is a remarkably perverse use of the word.

It was seriously stated that the boy and his parents should be grateful. After all, he was being given a chance to be cleansed of the stain of hereditary deicide. That they would not have subscribed to this superstition, did not occur to the speaker.

Almost unbelievably, it proved impossible to release the boy from his captors. Except for a handful of visits, closely supervised by Swiss Guards or the like, he never saw his parents again.

While expressing considerable sympathy for the parents, Dawkins was also somewhat critical of them.

They could have had their son back had they been baptised themselves. As it would have been under duress, no one could have blamed them. They could have crossed their fingers behind their backs.

Perhaps it never occurred to them. Or they might have feared that they would be ostracised by their co-religionists.

The most amazing thing is that this was not a unique event. So why did Jews continue employing Catholic shiksas?

Anyone who has lived in Golders Green could answer that. So often, someone will be called into a house as an ad hoc Shabbos goy to switch on the immersion heater or to switch a light on or off.

The amusing thing is that if the requested act is at all complicated, the householder will mime how to do it. He'll be almost doing it himself.

I don't object to this of course. But it is technically breaking the Sabbath anyway.

The commandment actually says, ''Thou shalt not do any work, nor thy manservant, nor thy maidservant nor the stranger that is within thy gates.' If you can turn a blind eye to a maidservant or a passing stranger lighting the fire, why not be really daring, and do it yourself?

I expressed a hope that the all Poland strikes agaisnt a near total abortion ban would spark off similar activism in Chile and Nicaragua. As far as I know this hasn't happened.

But even after the martyrdowm of Savita, Ireland has an almost total ban on abortion - even in cases of rape,incest or an unviable foetus. Inspired by their Polish sisters, woman througout Ireland demonstrated in favour of legal abortion on International Women's Day. It was a sight to behold.

'Sarah' told the BBC that she wasn't ready to be a mother. She used contraception but it failed. She tried to discuss abortion as an academic topic with her parents, without saying she was pregnant herself.

They became emotional and started shouting that it was murder. She knew she woud get no support there.

She and her boyfriend scraped together £200 worth of euros. She found a Liverpool phone number which she could ring for advice. She used a public kiosk so the conversation couldn't be traced, and sobbed thoughout the call.

She had to make an excuse for taking annual leave. Somebody met her off the ferry in Liverpool, but she still felt terrible that she had to slink away from her own country as a fugitive, that she was a criminal in the eyes of the Irish constitution.

Some of the rowdy demos featured placards with slogans such as 'Get out of My Box' or 'Get Out of my Vagina.' There were also dignified candlelit vigils with slogans such as 'We are All Savita Now.'

I'm not holding my breath as this is something that will require a constitutionoal change following a referendum. If I thought it would do any good, I would pray to the shade of Savita. Her shines are legion.

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It is the honest truth that a back street abortionist was sentenced to death in Ireland in 1956. It's true the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and the poor woman Mamie Cadden was soon transferred to a lunatic asylum.

But it was an eloquent comment on attitudes in Ireland that it could happen at all. Ostensibly this was not related to the death of the foetus. Mamie had allowed air to enter the woman's vagina which had caused a fatal heart embolism. But as it was not intentional, this could not have been murder.

By the way Dafydd, this is why it is no myth that cunnilingus can be fatal. Blowing into the orifice can cause an embolism. I know you don't believe it, but I read it in a book by an Israeli sexologist called rather aptly Avadah Offit.

Ireland is not quite so savage now. Having or performing an abortion now carries a sentence of no more than 14 years.

But it still takes a bit of nerve to stand outside the Dail and say, ''I'm going to swallow this abortion pill! I'm going to do it now! You can't stop me!''

It's also quite daring to go round in multi-coloured vans, gving out abortion pills. Plain vans would be more sensible.

A young woman called Clare was told the foetus she was carrying had Patau's Syndrome. It was going to die in the womb.

But doctors would not remove it. She had to wait another four months. Once it had stopped kicking, she was able to go to hospital and ask the staff to check that it was dead.

They removed it then because its heart had stopped. But the pregnancy was now so advanced that they could only do it by inducing premature labour.

That is an unnecessary additional trauma for the woman involved. But can you blame them? Would you want to go to prison for 14 years for surgically removing a foetus that wasn't viable?

Even Savita's non viable foetus was removed surgically - eventually, once its heart had stopped, but it was too late for Savita then.

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In most circumstances, the law is even harsher in Northern Ireland than in the Republic. Having anything to do with an abortion in Northern Ireland carries a life sentence.

The authorities are aware that it is now possible to order abortion pills online, and there have been two convictions for this. The police have even advised hospital staff to scrutinise women who attend casualty with problem vaginal bleeding. If they suspect it was triggered by an abortion pill, they are told they must report it.

The Stormont Assembly can't be bothered. It has given contradictory advice to hospitals. They should have a 'don't ask; don't tell' policy.

Mara who appeared on the Big Questions in an episode mentioned in a previous post, said she knew of a woman who had been raped and became pregnant. She gave up payments on her phone and maintaining her car so that she could save money for the trip to the mainland UK.

But she still couldn't manage it. She wasn't even given any sympathy by the rape crisis people she consulted. They told her that if she had an abortion, she would be worse than the rapist.

On his first day in office Donald Trump signed an order banning American overseas aid organiations from providing abortion services or even information about abortion anywhere in the world. One of the countries that has relied on American aid is Nepal where 50% of pregnancies are unplanned.

A man spoke to the BBC. Because of the stigma assoiciated with the subject, he had his back to the camera throughout.

He described what happened to his sister-in-law. She went to an underground clinic for an illegal abortion. The staff didn't know what they were doing.

She began bleeding heavily, so much so that she would need a transfusion. Her family and in-laws rushed her to a kosher hospital. But it was too late. She was dead.

As if women in Nepal didn't have enough to fear! In Nepal, the womb truly is the house of death for its owner very often.

Trump and his grisly goons call themselves pro-life. In fact they are destroying lives. But for the most part, they are female lives so it doesn't matter in their scheme of values.

I felt absolutely disgusted when Trump became president. For a while I was quite depressed about the whole thing.

But then I tried to look on the bright side. Hillary Clinton might have been competent, but once we recovered from the novelty of having a woman as the most powerful person in the world, she would have appeared conventional and a bit boring and predictable.

Trump's as mad as a coot. He would be sure to give us a good laugh. Ian Hislop and Trevor Noah have reacted similarly.

As a human being, you cannot but be appalled. But if you detach your emotions, you can see comedy value in the Trumpquake.

Alas, experience shows that childish adults might be unintentionallu funny. But they are dangerous if they get into positions of power, as we could see with Idi Amin and Emperor Bokassa.

I'm still laughing along at the Donald Trump show. But it's nervous laughter, and the humour is mostly gallows humour.